once upon a time is no more in the dark each page seems written upon light dawns a high ceiling is not wasted spaceTom Raworth: Shadows, from Collected Poems, 2003

"Expired" expired film: Image made with expired film ("a roll of a roll of
Kodak Plus-X 127 film, expired October 1953, shot through a Brownie
Holiday at Zion National Park"): photo by Moominsean via moominstuff, 5 September 2006

"Expired" expired film: Image made with expired film ("a roll of a roll of
Kodak Plus-X 127 film, expired October 1953, shot through a Brownie
Holiday at Zion National Park"): photo by Moominsean via moominstuff, 5 September 2006

"Expired" expired film: Image made with expired film ("a roll of a roll of
Kodak Plus-X 127 film, expired October 1953, shot through a Brownie
Holiday at Zion National Park"): photo by Moominsean via moominstuff, 5 September 2006

Celestograph I (The Full Moon): photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)

“I have worked like a devil and have traced the movements
of the moon and the real appearance of the firmament on a laid-out
photographic plate, independent from our misleading eye. I have done
this without a camera and without a lens. [...] The photographic plate
showed an area full of moons. Certainly, every spot on the photographic
plate reflects a moon. The camera misleads as the eye does and the tube
hoaxes the astronomers!”

-- August Strindberg: from a letter to Bengt Lidforss, a
physiologist, 26 December 1893, quoted in Katharina Steidl: Traces of/by nature: August Strindberg's photographic experiments of the 1890s(2010)

The
celestographs or coelestographs are photos of the sky taken without
camera or lens. The plates were directly exposed to the night sky for
some time and then developed. The plates are now lost and only prints
remain. August Strindberg thought he had captured the stars, so he
called the photos celestographs.

The series was taken during the winter of 1893-1894 in Dornach in Austria where Strindberg was staying with his wife Frida Uhl.

Strindberg
distrusted lenses and thought they gave a distorted rendering of
reality. The celestographs were therefore an attempt to produce a more
objective view of stars and planets. He sent the prints to the French
Astronomical Society, where they were discussed.

-- National Library of Sweden

Celestograph IV: The Sun: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)

TC, I know he has meant so much to you and so many others. I'll just take my place in the virtual second line and march his memory to glory listening to this band of giants you've assembled. Be well. k

Many thanks friends. Difficult to ever know what to say, any more, about the few (ok, too many) things that still do matter. TR a lovely friend for a very long time, going well back into the deepest sixties, comes to mind as I say that the image of a roundabout in Welwyn Garden City, the interchange where I more than once stood and waited mid-hitchhiking junket to visit the Rs in Barnet, where they then resided with teeming brood... T still toiling as night operator on transatlantic phone line in those days as I recall... remaining despite all now among those who merely stand or attempt to stand/bend and wait, while and so wishing to remain well back in the line... let my death come from Spayn quoth Francis Bacon (the earlier one)... he meant by the slow route (post horses)... but doth not the swift also have summat to recommend it... I esk ya.